San Diego to Redwoods National Park

We are finally off!

Our drive from San Diego was pretty uneventful - except Gouri forgot her purse in a restaurant in Sacramento where we stopped for dinner. Luckily, we went only 5 miles before we remembered and retrieved the purse. This has taught us how important it is to be extra vigilant of our wallets - esp when we travel overseas.

The drive through California Central Valley was pretty interesting to us. The boys were pretty fascinated by the California Aquaduct, which we had good views of along the road. Thanks to this water, California' is able to produce abundance of food, and us Southern Californians to have a comfortable life.

California Aquaduct, life source of California's Farming

We passed by many almond groves, tomato farms, sunflower fields, corn fields and grapes orchards. We saw many open gondola truck carrying tomatoes on I-5. Every so often, we saw bunch of tomatoes scattered on the side of the freeway. It seems like losing a few tomatoes is cheaper than transporting them in covered trucks.

We stopped at a Almond Orchard to show the boys how they grow

A ripe almond

Just north of Sacramento we turned west towards the coast to 101 and headed up to the Redwoods National Park. Interesting drive along the Avenue of Giants near the Humboldt Redwoods State park. These Redwoods are really awe-inspiring and so majestic. The boys were pretty thrilled to see many caves in these giant trees and played hide and seek. We spent the night camping in this state park.

We drove through the Avenue of Giants, where the old growth Redwoods are really giants!

Kids had a lot of fun climbing and hiding!

A fallen giant, the base of the tree is like a big room and the trunk is wide and long like a road

Our next night was also spent in a different part of the Redwoods - in the Redwoods National Park near Crescent City almost at the border with Oregon. The campground just off of Hwy 199, called Panther's Flat, was one of those unexpected finds. The campground is right along the middle fork of the Smith River, we slept to the lull of the running river.

Tomasz preparing the camp


Kids learnt to make a campfire

More photos at of this part of the trip at http://picasaweb.google.com/sdjohannsens/SD_to_Redwoods